It’s a strange, striking work featuring females encased in tight, white costumes (by fashion designer Brooke Roberts) adorned with spine-like appendages. The brief, highly stylised drama in which they’re engaged is at once creepy, romantic and a matter of life-and-death, and it’s set to Bernard Herrmann’s unforgettable score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

‘I’ve always loved that music,’ the Italian-born choreographer admits. ‘It’s very layered, majestic and melancholic. I wanted Athletes to have that feel.’ Thematically, he adds, his dance ‘questions the relation between progress and destruction. My thinking was influenced by Mayan apocalyptic prophecies, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and, of course, Hitchcock.’

The result is stunningly ambiguous. ‘There haven't been any weird interpretations so far,’ Buscarini claims, ‘but I'm looking forward to some. I hope Edinburgh audiences will get wild and creative!”

As a child his dream was to become a puppeteer. 'I was fascinated by the idea of creating worlds on stage and delivering them to people. I’d like to think that somehow I’m still doing the same through dance.’

Riccardo Buscarini / Tir Danza
Winner of The Place Prize for Dance 2013 sponsored by Bloomberg, Athletes is a work on competition viewed as tension between man and machine. Three enigmatic figures shift from solidarity to cruelty in a sparsely beautiful futuristic landscape created by the atmospheric, eye-slitting…